93 Books Like Just Above My Head

James Baldwin recalled that he wrote this book in between the assassinations of his friends Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. I have read numerous letters written by Baldwin, and this long essay, written during the 1960s, shares some of the intimacy found in his correspondence as he reflects on his role in the Civil Rights Movement.

It’s one of my favorite essays by Baldwin because it reveals his complexity and inconsistencies, giving glimpses into how he was torn between his role as a writer, artist, and activist. “[W]hat in the world was I by now,” Baldwin wonders,” but an aging, lonely, sexually dubious, politically outrageous, unspeakably erratic freak?” The writing is uneven in places, but the power and insight of Baldwin’s inimitable prose hold the essay together. 

This book, a collaboration with photographer Richard Avedon, is experimental, exhilarating, and exasperating. I’ve always been drawn to it, which includes striking portraits by Avedon (Marilyn Monroe, Civil Rights workers, Allen Ginsberg) alongside Baldwin’s gnomic and haunting essay.

Panned by the New York Times in 1964, the book has been overlooked by scholars and fans of Baldwin’s work, which encouraged me to return to this troubling book. Published shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nothing Personal offers up a portrait of the United States as complex and dangerous. Baldwin’s rage at the state of America is apparent, but I’m drawn to his writing about love, which he sees as key to the country’s future: 

“The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another,” Baldwin writes, “the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out.”

I remember reading a review of Baldwin’s fourth novel in the New York Times, which described this book as “a disaster in virtually every particular—theme, characterization, plot, rhetoric.” Ouch. For me, this novel, though uneven, is an important work in which Baldwin explores his commitments as a queer activist and artist, something that most reviewers missed at the time. 

During the Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin was nicknamed “Martin Luther Queen,” and he received vicious broadsides about his sexuality from the likes of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Tell Me writes back to Cleaver and his cohort. As I’ve found with all of Baldwin’s writing, it’s worth sifting through some of the weaker writing to find passages that surprise and delight. “[If] one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally,” Baldwin writes, “we can release each other from… show more.

I like it when writers take risks. Baldwin’s writing is frequently poetic, and while he was one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished essay writers, a successful novelist, and playwright, he is not remembered as a poet.

Jimmy’s Blues, published in 1983, a collection of nineteen poems, intrigues me. Why, I wonder, did the writer turn to poetry towards the end of his life? Was he aware of his impending death, which might explain why many of the poems were preoccupied with time? I am ambivalent about some of the poems on the page, but there are recordings of Baldwin reading his verse on the wonderful album A Lover’s Question, produced by the Belgian jazz singer David Linx.

Listening to Baldwin read from his poem, “Inventory/on being 52,” gives me chills. It’s spellbinding and is a reminder of how important Baldwin’s delivery is when it comes to his poems. 

I recommend this book because James Baldwin’s brilliant voice and profound writing explore the intersection of personal truths and deeply held beliefs. Baldwin masterfully captures the youth and naivety of John Grimes as he wrestles with sexuality, faith, and the pervasive racism of his time.

This book brilliantly brings these struggles to life while showcasing Baldwin’s gift for conveying complex emotions and societal pressures with intimacy and precision. 

The Ballad of Black Tom rocked my world.

I was already writing stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft but I wasn’t sure I had a place in the genre. Then Victor LaValle took one of Lovecraft’s most racist works, The Horror At Red Hook, and produced an alternate version.

Black Tom touches on the events of Lovecraft’s original story but tells the tale from the point of view of a black musician named Tommy Tester. LaValle’s reimagining of Lovecraft is a revelation.

He showed me that I didn’t have to be like Lovecraft to write in his world. And LaValle perfectly captures the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a world that Lovecraft’s racism prevented him from seeing, even though he lived in New York City at the time.

A novel about a black Sheriff’s efforts to catch a serial killer in the fictional small town and surrounding area of Charon County, Virginia, where racism is real and visceral, and the Confederates are considered heroes by many.

The book brilliantly transports you inside the complex racial and religious realities of everyday life in a small Virginia town. Crosby’s ear for language and understanding of daily life in such a place take you there. You can picture not just the characters but also very much the place—from the town to the farms to the buildings to the rooms in them—and to the food and alcohol people drink. Small-town America is brought to vivid life.

I knew Michelle when she was teaching at Stanford University before she wrote this book, but I didn’t know then how much of the work she’d done. Her book is so profound that when I first read it, I was in Vegas on vacation, and I couldn’t get out of the room because I was so deep into reading her book. I couldn’t get to the great food or the penny slots because she was putting together all the pieces I had read about or heard discussed in different places, and she built a picture of the system of oppression Black people live under in the United States.

She affirmed what I had suspected: that incarceration continues the enslavement of Black people. I called a colleague and said, this book will have more impact than I could making speeches to a thousand people at a time, a hundred times a… show more.

Any novel that shines a light on the adventures and misadventures of a fictional Seattle Mariners third baseman with a pet elephant that answers to the name Renoir is worthy of your time and attention. I’m late to the party on this but so glad I sparked to it. 

I vividly remember reading Native Son in high school, and to this day it remains one of my favorites (as well as one of the best novels of the 20th Century).

So, when I heard a few years ago that Richard Wright’s lost-lost novella was going to be published nearly thirty years after his death, I picked up a copy. Wow. It’s the story of a Black man, accused of a crime he didn’t commit, who evades capture by (yes, as the title says) living underground in the sewers.

The survival aspects, including his ingenuity and the break-ins into buildings and basements he plans to get supplies, are fascinating. But above all this is a story about injustice and what one person is forced to do to survive in an unequal society. A great read!